This raises the specter of something way beyond the placebo effect, and cuts even further into the work of alternative therapists, because we should remember that alternative therapists don’t just give placebo treatments; they also give what we might call placebo explanations or placebo diagnoses: ungrounded, unevidenced, often fantastical assertions about the nature of the patient’s disease, involving magical properties, or energy, or supposed vitamin deficiencies, or “imbalances,” which the therapist claims uniquely to understand.
